The Lobster the Better
Posted By Paul Kotik on 15 August 2005
Miami. Sun, money, rhythm, spice, lust, speed, pastel walls and turquoise waters. People looking fine and enjoying the good life. Miami, Florida is the capital of the Western Hemisphere, where everybody from Tierra del Fuego to Anchorage eventually comes to play. It’s about hot bodies, the ocean, Ferraris, Cigarette speedboats and Cuban cigars. South Beach, baby.
There’s no place like it in the world.
Come August 6, though, the Beautiful People turn away from silicone implants, botox and diamonds to …. bugs.
Bugs. Ugly, creepy, prickly things that look like nothing so much as gigantic roaches. Except they live in the sea.
It’s lobster season.
Anybody with a few dollars can score a lobstering permit at any one of a zillion locations, get in the ocean and gather up to the legal limit of six of the creatures each day, until March 31, 2006. That is, if the skill and daring are there. It does take a little effort; for scuba divers a little effort, that is, but for the freedivers quite a bit more.
I set out with two buddies from a Biscayne Bay marina just a few days after this year’s season opened. The dawn rush hour traffic on the Miami roads was murder – like that of any dynamic metro area, I suppose. It was kind of cool to get where I was going and climb aboard a fast, lean power boat instead of planting my butt in an office chair. An hour later we had slashed through a flat calm Atlantic and were well south and east of downtown Miami. There was nothing in sight – no pleasure boats, no land, nothing but the surreal vision of a perfect tropical sky and the mirage spires of the city towers on a distant horizon.
I’m not at liberty to disclose the location, even in vague terms, of our hunting grounds. South Floridians take their bug-hunting very, very seriously, and I do want to have lunch in this town again sometime. In fact, it may be that I wasn’t really there – so there’s no use in abducting and interrogating me.
- Bookmark with :
- what are these?
